Cosmologist, teacher, and Berry-collaborator, Brian Swimme, with @SHSoakland and @drewdellinger, at the @CIIS_SF launch event for Swimme's new book, Cosmogenesis.
"To become serious is no good. Serious people are terrible.
To be non-trivial does not mean to be serious.
The fulfillment of life lies between the trivial and the serious."
—Thomas Berry in Assisi (1992)
"When we say 'tree' we are actually talking about a relationship of soil, air, sun, and moisture.
To designate a tree alone is impossible, an abstraction."
1/3
"So, too, with the human. We have no existence apart from the total Earth community that births us, sustains us, and participates in every facet of our lives."
2/3
"In our science the part is primary, the whole is derivative. Science is frustrated by wholes."
--Thomas Berry, critiquing modern, Western science; (Assisi 1992)
"Now we can't afford to be simply well-intentioned; we have to be right. We have to know what we're after, which is a viable Planet Earth. We have to know what is viable."
--Thomas Berry (1991)
"Our scientists have just been plain stupid. The petroleum is there [in the ground] for a very good reason—to store the carbon so as to maintain the chemical balance of the atmosphere, to keep the life systems viable."
--Thomas Berry (1991)